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Will Voter ID Laws Disenfranchise Democratic Voters?

By David Firestone February 21, 2012 2:02 pmFebruary 21, 2012 2:02 pm

Rick Hasen, a law professor at the University of California, Irvine, and one of the nation’s foremost experts on election law, has published a preview of a new book with a sobering reminder for those of us who oppose the growing body of laws requiring identification in order to vote.

It’s not possible to show, he says, that many people have actually been deterred from voting by these laws. In part, that’s because many of these laws are new, and in part it’s because many of the people who lack an ID card tend not to be interested in voting in the first place.
Republicans, he writes, may very well be trying to suppress the vote of Democratic-leaning groups, including minorities, and have found success in using the wedge issue of voter fraud to excite their base. At the same time, Democrats have used anger against the laws for their own political purposes, he says, and need to be careful not to exaggerate their measurable effects.

But having established a rare level of sobriety on a very fraught subject, Mr. Hasen makes it clear that he is still very much opposed to these laws. And the principal reason is that there is no need for them.

The only useful purpose for an ID law is to prevent impersonation at the polls, and there is absolutely no good evidence that this is a problem anywhere, he says. Without any solid reason, governments should not be in the business of making it harder for anyone to vote.

“Voting should not be a difficult activity; everyone entitled to vote should be able to vote,” he writes on his election-law blog. “We should not put stumbling blocks in front of voters to solve a non-existent problem. The dignity of the voter is just too high.”

Three years after Indiana passed its 2005 ID law, about 1,000 people showed up at the polls in the 2008 election without identification, and most of their ballots were not counted. That’s not a huge number compared to the 2.8 million Indiana voters whose ballots did count (though of course it doesn’t include an unknown number of people who didn’t vote knowing they lacked ID).

But even a few hundred votes can make a difference in a razor-thin election, Mr. Hasen notes – another reason why the laws are bad policy. And denying those few hundred voters their franchise even in a race that isn’t close deprives them of a basic American right.

Mr. Hasen’s work shows how Republicans have been falsely crying “fraud” for years, and simply turn up the volume whenever confronted by the clear lack of evidence for their claims. It is not necessary to show precisely how many people will be affected by their work to demonstrate that, on its face, it is a terrible way to make laws.